Katie Greene | The Grand Rapids PressApproximately 130 Lee Middle School sixth-grade students stretched from Burton Street to Engle Street along Havana Avenue SW to convey the height of the World Trade Center towers that were destroyed in the 2001 terror attacks in New York.

WYOMING — Stretched out along the Havana Avenue SW sidewalk from Burton Street to Engle Street, about 120 sixth-graders from Godfrey-Lee couldn’t see one end of their line from the other.

And that’s the point, said science teacher Sonna Pohlson, who helped design the Friday exercise, intended to teach kids too young to remember the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks just how big the World Trade Center towers truly were, by replicating a distance equal to their height.

Superintendent David Britten, Pohlson and other teachers walked the line and told kids how nearly each of them represented an entire floor that held hundreds of people in each of the Twin Towers, trying to quantify the magnitude of the tragedy in simple math terms. “It’s hard for people to grasp,” Britten said.

Corrine Parr, 12, standing at the “base” of the tower on the corner of Engle and Havana, waved an American flag and said she’d like to “make a model of the twin towers and add onto it over time, like it was getting built again.”

On Monday, the students will be using Skype to video chat with classmates in the Albemarle County School District in Virginia, sharing what they have been learning about terrorism and the attacks on New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.